Hamnet
When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.
From the archives
·
2016
The Course of Love
Having always imagined that they would have children one day, they decide, four years into their marriage, to stop preventing the possibility. After seven months they get the news beside the bathroom sink, in the form of a faint blue line within a cotton-backed porthole on a plastic stick—which doesn’t seem a wholly fitting medium to herald the arrival of a new member of the race, a being who might still be around ninety-five years from now, and who will come to refer to the two presently underwear-clad people with an as yet unbelievable sobriquet: “my parents.”
During the long months of the phoney war, they wonder what exactly they should be doing. Familiar with the difficulties of their own lives, they look on this as a chance to get everything right from the very start, beginning with the details. A Sunday supplement recommends more potato skins and raisins, herring and walnut oil, which Kirsten zealously commits herself to as a way of warding off some of the terror she feels at her lack of control over everything occurring inside her. While she is in meetings or on the bus, at a party or doing the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality. Small wonder she goes to bed early. She has never been so concerned about anything in her life.
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The Course of Love
Having always imagined that they would have children one day, they decide, four years into their marriage, to stop preventing the possibility. After seven months they get the news beside the bathroom sink, in the form of a faint blue line within a cotton-backed porthole on a plastic stick—which doesn’t seem a wholly fitting medium to herald the arrival of a new member of the race, a being who might still be around ninety-five years from now, and who will come to refer to the two presently underwear-clad people with an as yet unbelievable sobriquet: “my parents.”
During the long months of the phoney war, they wonder what exactly they should be doing. Familiar with the difficulties of their own lives, they look on this as a chance to get everything right from the very start, beginning with the details. A Sunday supplement recommends more potato skins and raisins, herring and walnut oil, which Kirsten zealously commits herself to as a way of warding off some of the terror she feels at her lack of control over everything occurring inside her. While she is in meetings or on the bus, at a party or doing the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality. Small wonder she goes to bed early. She has never been so concerned about anything in her life.
Read more of this excerpt...
WORDS TO LIVE BY
“This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”
2010 ·
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell
NON-FICTION
NEW MUSIC